Nature tour stop four: Schenck Forest.
Like Raulston, Schenck Forest is an NCSU research facility. It’s an educational forest where they teach future natural resource managers, foresters, and others about forestry, wayfinding, and biology. It’s named after the father of modern forestry, Carl Schenck, and sits on the site of a former prison farm that made up an area that originally included Prairie Ridge and the NC Museum of Art.
I like Schenck Forest’s biodiversity and it has some great trails through the woods. I’m featuring a moss I found on my hike there today because I love mosses and and this one seemed especially pretty. I spent all of my pre-Raleigh life in the southwestern US and mosses are hard to find there due to the dry air. Though I’ve lived in Raleigh since 2012 and know they’re all over the area, I am still happy to find mosses every time! They’re very primitive plants with complicated biology - they’re awesome little plants, and gorgeous too!
I’m not aware of any moss specific citizen science projects, so I share my moss photos with Natural North Carolina, an NC focused biodiversity survey housed within iNaturalist. To participate, find any living thing (no people or pets!) and photograph it, then upload to iNatualist via the app or the website. Be sure to select Natural North Carolina as your project when you do! The iNaturalist image recognition algorithm with help ID the species for you and other users may be able to help confirm or correct your IDs. The data is going toward a long-term dataset that hopes to track species movements over time, range expansions and contractions, and the introduction of invasive species. Personally, I just like having a place to share my nature photos with people who can use them, so I enjoy participating thoroughly.
Photo by @bug_lover
#moss#plant#schenckforest#nature#citizenscience